Caged Bird | ✔

Chapter Thirty

Bird catcher

She did not know who I was, I did not exactly expect her to remember, plus she has not seen me in years, it makes perfect sense that she would not. Yet I had thought that maybe the name would have been a dead giveaway

William, - Will

Surely, she could not have forgotten my name

We are stepsiblings after all

To be fair, there are a thousand people with the exact same name as me, she could have just thought it to be a coincidence.

Ava, as I've come to realize is very dramatic when it comes to the whole predicament that we have currently found ourselves in, she calls it kidnapping

I don't quite agree, I have not brought her here to harm her, whereas kidnapping implies that you capture someone, hold them against their will and have malicious intent for them

I do not have malevolent intent for her, in the slightest; in fact, it is quite the opposite, this I am certain about

Throughout the course of my entire life, I have only ever been certain about her, and of her needs and protection always

Mom used to tell me things like; 'you won't understand until you have kids of your own' when she had done something so morally cruel to me that I would hate her for it

I get that now, again I don't agree with moms words exactly as I don't think someone needs to be your child in order for you to deeply care about their wellbeing, but I can't deny that instinct to always want to protect her seems to be embedded into my system.

Admittedly, I have not done such a good job of it in the last couple of years, but I used to be great at it

It was the one thing I always knew I was good at; protecting her

I have never been the type of person to consider myself to be good at things. No matter what I did, I was just okay in it, never great or phenomenal; - in fact, I could not name you one thing that I, let alone anyone else thought I was good at

Before Ava

Caring for her was something that had come so natural to me, that it was the first time that I had felt a true sense of purpose.

A purpose I had not even felt after having enlisted and had come home after my very first tour. A tour that I had genuinely believed that I would not have made it out of alive

With serving, you fought these large scale battles that were so vast, that you didn't know if your small contributions were causing changes, you just fought blindly and hoped that the harder you fought, the quicker it would bring about ending the war

With Ava, It was very much different; everything I did for her was always in her favor, even if she might not have seen it that way

I was 12 years old when dad had married her mom Viviane, and 13 years old when Viviane gave birth to Ava

I never liked Viviane, she always smelt bad, was the perfect example of someone who had aged badly; with weathered skin and yellow teeth, and a body that resembled one of a skeleton because of how the drugs had rotted her body over the years.

Viviane was mean and manipulative and selfish, and quite frankly up till today I never understood why dad had married her in the first place

Nothing good came from Viviane, apart from Ava. Ava was the sweetest little baby I had ever known, she never cried, never made much noise either, and whenever you would peek into her crib to check on her, she would be smiling at you, looking up at you with the most trusting eyes